October 2021

Well, here we are—19 months since my last movie blog post. The final movie I saw before the pandemic shut everything down (St. Frances) was on March 15, 2020. I've already described how dramatically life on Earth changed literally overnight, so all that's left is to recount what has transpired in the better part of two years that have elapsed since then. Movie-wise, nothing. With thousands of movies available for me to watch on my computer or iPad, you'd think I'd avail myself, but my interest level plummeted. I did continue to watch TV, listen to music and read books. A more or less complete list of the books I read during the pandemic includes: Watching You, The Family Upstairs, Invisible Girl and The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell; If It Bleeds, Later and Billy Summers by Stephen King; The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides; Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir; Close Your Eyes by Rachel Abbott; The Best Friend by Shalini Boland; The End of Her by Shari Lapena; and Playing Nice by J.P. Delaney. Beyond reading, watching TV and listening to music, pretty much the only highlight worth mentioning during the pandemic was that I joined TikTok, first as a viewer, then as a creator. In August or September of this year, a fellow creator inspired me to watch four movies he recommended: 

UNSTOPPABLE (2010)—Train conductors Denzel Washington and Chris Pine must try to stop a runaway train in Pennsylvania before a mass tragedy occurs. Very suspenseful and engrossing, with good performances by both leads, plus Rosario Dawson. (9)

COP LAND (1997)—Sylvester Stallone is a New Jersey sheriff whose town is populated by corrupt cops. Will he tell rat-squad chief Robert DeNiro what he knows about these morally corrupt law-enforcement officers (Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta) and get the crap beaten out of him, or stay silent? The movie is intermittently entertaining, but suffers from too many people (including Sly himself) smoking cigarettes nonstop. (7)

TERROR TRACT (2000) Ever since I was a kid, I have loved horror anthology movies. When I was in middle school, I saw a couple (Tales from the Crypt and Asylum) that captured my imagination, and 1982's Creepshow was Stephen King's contribution to the genre. Since then, I've seen many more, but none have been as impressive. Terror Tract is a TV movie featuring the late John Ritter as a real-estate salesman who's trying desperately to sell a property where some Very Bad Things happened, and those things provide the springboard for three creepy flashback stories. The first involves a jealous husband, his cheating wife, her boyfriend, and an ill-fated murder plot. The second is about a little girl who befriends a mischievous monkey that infuriates the girl's dad (Bryan Cranston). Finally, the third story is about a teenager who has visions about how the people around him keep getting killed. It's all moderately entertaining, done on a shoestring budget; the monkey episode, though quite silly, is really the only memorable thing in it. (6)

CLIFFORD (1994)—I had always been curious about this comedy, which has a great cast, including Martin Short, Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen and Dabney Coleman. Short, who is one of the funniest comedic performers of my lifetime, plays 10-year-old Clifford, who basically drives his uncle (Grodin) crazy with his pranks and misdeeds. The movie was universally panned at the time of release, but I had been persuaded to view it with an open mind. That proved ineffective, as the movie is so relentlessly awful that it almost hurt to watch. For nearly half the movie, the characters are all screaming at each other. It was so sad to see truly talented performers stuck in this dreadful excuse for a film. (1)

This month, I made my first trip to a movie since March 2020. The Pacific Theater at the Grove shopping plaza—which went out of business during the pandemic—reopened this year as an AMC theater. Numerous new films have opened, and I was eager to dip my toe into the cinematic pool. So I saw:

THE FRENCH DISPATCH (2021)—So enthralled was I by 2018's Isle of Dogs that I was super-stoked to check out Wes Anderson's latest concoction. Everything from the director's bag of tricks is on display here: the dollhouse-type pans from room to room, the bright color palette, the quirky characters, the odd dialogue, even the fonts are part of his trademark. Although ostensibly taking place at the office of a New Yorker-style publication headed up by the aging Bill Murray, it's really another anthology film, and the three stories that unfold are all re-enactments of the publication's feature articles. Of the three, I only enjoyed the first one, which is about an artist (Benicio del Toro) who's in prison after committing a couple of murders. While in lockup, his work gains popularity, and his talent ultimately leads to his early release from jail. There's not much to the story, but it is told with a huge amount of humor, imagination and sensuality. The final two stories are total bores, although the art direction is typically amazing. (6) overall. 

March 2020

Because I have numerous contacts in China, due to a language-exchange app I use called Tandem, I started paying attention to the Coronavirus crisis earlier than the average American. I chat with Chinese people every day in Tandem, so I have been hearing stories about the mandatory isolations and school closings on a regular basis since January. Even so, when I began this installment of my movie blog at the beginning of March, I scarcely realized that it might be my last—at least, for a while. It all happened very quickly. The morning that Joan and I saw Saint Frances (March 15), we tried to get breakfast at Western Bagel, as is our customary Sunday-morning routine, and were shocked to find that it was “takeout only”—no customers were allowed to sit down in the place. We were, however, able to sit down at Denny’s, and after the movie, we enjoyed our regular lunch at Black Angus. There are usually very few moviegoers at the Arclight Hollywood on Sunday mornings, but the theater had arranged the seating so that people could only sit in every other row, to encourage social distancing. When we parted, both of us had a feeling that life was about to change, and that it might be our last movie for a while. Sure enough, the next day, all movie theaters in the state closed down. This was the true beginning of our Great Isolation, and one that we obviously all hope won’t last very long. In the meantime… TV: Modern Family is rocketing to its series finale; I watched the first episode of The Stranger and binge-watched Season 5 of Inside No. 9. MUSIC: Listened to a ton of Magnetic Fields and Neil Young songs. BOOKS: Finally finished Close to Home by Cara Hunter, then read Someone We Know by Shari Lapena, and am now nearly finished with Right Behind You by Rachel Abbott. Here are the three movies I saw in March:

THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020)—Jettisoning H.G. Wells’ original story, Universal has fashioned the latest “invisible” movie into a psychological thriller, and darned if it doesn’t improve on the premise! This time out, Elizabeth Moss plays a wife who manages to flee from her abusive husband. After he commits suicide, she begins to suspect that he might not be dead after all, but still making her life a living hell in “unseen” form. An edge-of-your-seat suspense movie from beginning to end, with great special effects. (9)

ONWARD (2020)—I run very hot and cold with Pixar’s animated movies. Some I love (Toy Story 1-3, The Incredibles 1-2, WALL-E), some are overrated (A Bug’s Life, Up, Finding Nemo) and some leave me completely cold (Inside Out, Cars). Onward, this year’s first Pixar offering, belongs in the first category. It’s an old-fashioned adventure story with fun characters and all of the Disney clichés. Much of its success can be credited to the perfect voice characterizations, especially Chris Pratt as Barley Lightfoot. Only debit: It goes on a little too long. (9)

SAINT FRANCES (2020)—I am sure this will win my “sleeper of the year” award. It’s a funny and moving story about a 34-year-old woman named Bridget—sort of a prettier Amy Schumer—who takes a job as a nanny when she’s wholly unqualified for such a job. It’s a charming and romantic comedy/drama written and starring Kelly O’Sullvan, and one of the year’s best. (10) And maybe the year’s last!

NOTE: Yes—it turned out to be the last movie I saw in 2020.

February 2020

This month, I traveled to San Jose to see three shows: South Bay Musical Theatre’s 2020 Hindsight: Songs I [Stephen Sondheim] Wish I’d Written, She Loves Me and Alan Ayckbourn’s farce Taking Steps. Jay was the narrator/host of the first, and attended the second two with me. All were great fun. Almost as soon as I got home, I flew to Miami to attend the boat show, where a lot of little things went annoyingly wrong. I also subscribed to Newspapers.com and launched an ambitious project archiving old comic strips from the 1960s and 1970s. TV: I finished re-cycling through the old Larry Sanders Show and started re-cycling through the old Taxi series. BOOKS: I continued listening to Close to Home—very nearly done! Here are the movies I watched in February:

RHYTHM SECTION (2020)—Decent enough action/spy flick, wherein members of Blake Lively’s family perish in a transatlantic plane crash, and she ends up spending the whole movie hunting down the people who conspired to bring the airliner down. To call it “muddled” would be an understatement (Joan and I couldn’t really figure out what the antagonists’ motives were), and it’s all totally farfetched, eye-rollingly bogus and laughably ridiculous, the way all “ordinary people become highly skilled assassins overnight” stories are. Even so, the movie keeps the fights and explosions coming at a brisk clip, and despite how implausible it all was, it was relatively entertaining. (7)

BIRDS OF PREY (2020)—I needed to kill a couple of hours in South Florida, and this movie was the perfect vehicle to help me do that. I did not see The Suicide Squad, which introduced the world to Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, but I was told that this stand-alone crime thriller kicked off with a cool animated origin story for our comic-book heroine, and it did. In this movie, mischief-loving Harley teams up with a few other women to help protect a young girl from deranged psychopaths Ewan McGregor and Chris Messina. (Messina seemed so familiar to me during the movie; looking him up afterwards, I was astonished to find that he’d played Danny on The Mindy Project!) The movie is mindlessly entertaining, as is the goofy Betty Boop voice that Robbie provides for Harley. (8)

THE PHOTOGRAPH (2020)—Dull, slow-moving romantic drama about a dead photographer (adorable Chanté Adams) and the romance that develops between her grown daughter (Issa Rae) and a reporter (Lakeith Stanfield) who’s researching a story about her. While I enjoyed watching Adams in her flashback scenes, the movie is only occasionally diverting; mostly it’s about as lively as watching paint dry. Nice, jazzy musical score. (6)

THE LODGE (2020)—Good reviews sparked my curiosity about this horror movie about a dad who takes his financé (Riley Keough) and his two young kids to a snowy lodge. The kids blame their dad’s romance for the death of their mom (Alicia Silverstone, who gets to do one of those splattery shotgun suicide scenes like Vincent D'Onofrio did in Full Metal Jacket). Eventually the tension between the kids and the financé leads to a bizarre confrontation and situation that may or not have supernatural overtones. The “big reveal” was extremely far-fetched and soured the movie for me. (5)

DARK WATERS (2019)—When I was quite young, I asked my father how cigarette companies could be allowed to sell a product that was proven to cause cancer. “Well,” he explained, taking a drag on his Kool filter, “that would put an awful lot of people out of work, wouldn’t it? You can’t just suddenly put so many thousands of people out of a job.” That seemed as crazy an explanation to me then as it did when I was watching this movie, which is based on the very same conceit. Dark Waters is all about how Dupont, which employed many people in West Virginia, was poisoning the water supply as it manufactured the chemical used to make Teflon and dumped the hazardous wastes. The company was in the government’s back pocket, the Environmental Protection Agency turned a blind eye, and people started dying (including Dupont’s own employees). One whistleblower and his attorney (Mark Ruffalo) are scapegoated by the community, many of whom stand to lose their jobs if Dupont is held accountable. Ruffalo spends almost 20 years trying to slay this dragon. This is an Erin Brockovich-type drama about how the little guy stands up to the Mighty Evil Corporation. It’s a compelling but very sad movie. (8)

EMMA (2020)—Pretty slow-moving period piece (at least for the first half to three-quarters). Then, thank God, it finally picked up the pace. Fitfully amusing adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, but the best things about the film are the amazing costumes and Emma’s curly hair style. Anya Taylor-Joy is perfect as Emma. (8)

THE OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS (2020)—As usual, I caught the collection of Oscar-nominated short films, both the live-action and animated featurettes. A real mixed bag this year, with only one truly outstanding live-action short (the gripping kidnapping-themed A Sister) and a couple of great cartoons (Sister, Hair Love). In fact, A Sister may be the best film I see all year.